Ahmed Gaber

Photographer

Delta

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A Buheira summer, pungent as rural summers are with smells of corn and citrus, pregnant with the sounds
of laughing doves and newborn lambs. The clouds are like cotton.

From them, fell rice onto a flooding Blue
River. I farm this soil: and my father, grandfather, and father before him.

Children run across crop fields and return to mothers wary of muddy steps. We found the Earth underneath our nails.
And it became our skin, brown and golden tones. This is home.
I am home.

Today, 95 percent of Egyptians live on 5 percent of the land. Since antiquity, the Nile River has supplied irrigation,
settlement, transportation and food. The delta soil is rich in nutrients from large silt deposits left behind as the river flows
upward, to the Mediterranean Sea. It is a lifeline. But now it seems to be growing lifeless.

The Nile is becoming hazardous, as municipal and industrial waste pollute its banks and swim to its delta.

Heavy metals including lead have spread violently onto land and into bodies: the Delta has never been dryer and its people sicker by the day.

With infertile soiland scarce funds for day-to-day needs, many are unable to afford medical care—let alone a hospital visit. Kidney failure,
Parkinson’s, and other diseases mark entire villages vulnerable.
“Delta” is an ongoing project calling to witness the endurance of community.

It documents the lives and labor on farming ands in a fading delta.

The defining tension each image explores is the struggle to create possibility within and remedy for crisis. However, against all odds, delta communities find consolation in their unity and still rejoice in festivities, weddings, and regular gatherings. How these images engage in space contends to the camera’s role in articulating complex relationships with ourselves and with each other.